Why these countries?

One common question we receive from our friends/family is "how did you pick the countries you did?" We had a couple of basic ideas, and the rest fell into place:

• Primary focus on countries/areas neither of us have been to
• Countries whose economics are "no income for 6 months" friendly
• No travel on Soviet-Era aircraft (Tupolev, Ilyuhshin, Yakovlev)
• Exclude Europe, since its relatively easy to make short trips when visiting Marie's family (and its absurdly expensive when compared to the places we ended up choosing)
• We each have 1 veto